Conventionally, a system where multiple devices communicate is employed in a facility such as a house, for example. For example, a user is able to control information appliances connected over a home network by transmitting commands to these information appliances from a mobile terminal. This improves user convenience. Thus, various techniques are being considered. For example, Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2012-37783 (PTD 1) discloses an information appliance system which provides an improved operability, without reducing its convenience. According to the technology disclosed in PTD 1, a result of speech recognition by a speech recognition means is transmitted as recognition result information to an information appliance, With this, in a system comprising information appliances connected to one another over a network, a user is able to control the information appliances via a speech recognition server through voice input to a mobile terminal.